Motherless in Seattle

Bernadette Fox loathes Seattle, a city she calls the “dreary upper-left corner of the Lower Forty-eight.” Her husband, Elgie, has become the stereotypical Seattle man: a Microsoft executive who rides a bike and works endless hours on code-named IT projects. And don’t even get her started on the weather.“What you’ve...

Motherhood on the edge

For those of us who have only been to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland—and whose main source of information about the City of Angels is supermarket tabloids—it seems a mysterious and slightly bizarre place with a tan, thin and vacuously blonde population.While Maria Semple's provocative, searingly funny portrait of life in La La Land in This One Is Mine does little to change the...